


Safehouse

by ArdeaWrites



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Calhoun thinks in cat metaphors, Gen, Xen - Freeform, friendships, half life 2 - Freeform, post-Nova Prospekt, pre-Citadel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26110240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: Set in the same timeline as Stray Physicists, just after the slow teleport. Eventually the main story will catch up but I'm working ahead and got this bit done early.Calhoun does the math and figures out Freeman's been on his feet too long. Then she does some more math and takes a guess at what's bugging him. Little summary of immediate Black Mesa aftermath for her, plus a glimpse of life in a post-fall Earth.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 39





	Safehouse

  


The safehouse was just a two-room apartment with boarded-up windows and a solid ceiling. The stairwell was littered with broken glass and metal shards. Getting up it silently was impossible. 

Calhoun hoped it was empty but if it held other rebels that was alright too- as long as they let the two of them stay. Freeman had been walking with a wobble for an hour and she didn’t like the way his eyes darted or how his reactions had slowed. She’d gotten him out of the train station what, ten days ago? It’d taken him only a few minutes to run afoul of CP, then most of the day to get down the river to Black Mesa East. 

Then all night in Ravenholm, from what she’d gathered; she’d come through Mesa East in the wake of the Combine raid. Between her and Kleiner they’d salvaged an impressive amount of equipment and documentation the Combine hadn’t thought important enough to steal or destroy. After Ravenholm, Freeman had made his way along the coast heading for Nova Prospekt, drawing Combine forces away on a scout-car goose chase while she ferried Kleiner and equipment via inland roads. 

And then there’d been the slow teleport… and Freeman had landed in a full-on war zone. In his absence the Combine had remembered their greater goal of subjugating humanity, but humanity had awakened to the idea of a free planet and rebelled. Coordinated attacks in cities around the world had left the Combine scrambling to reassert authority and they meant to make an example out of City 17, their primary stronghold. 

Freeman had showed up only a few hours ago. Nova Prospekt was…Calhoun felt like she ought to be counting on her fingers. His second night, yes. He’d spent two days and two nights fighting for his and others’ lives, and now was going on night three. They were pushing hard for the Citadel, to bring down its generators and shields and their city’s suppression field, but the preparations took time. Staggering supplies and ammunition, laying in escape lines for the wounded, coordinating gruella attacks to weaken the Combine front and draw their forces away, cleaning sniper nests from adjoining blocks and vantage points, stockpiling rockets for the inevitable striders. 

They had time to give a man a few hours’ sleep. 

It was a little after midnight, her time, but she’d actually slept a whole eight hours in the past twenty-four and could stay up through the next day if necessary. Life skills. 

She nodded to the ancient, discolored mattresses on the floor, the only furnishings left in the safehouse. “We’ll rejoin the squad in the morning. Not much more we can do tonight, not with venom spiders crawling all over the streets.” 

She sat against the wall, facing the door, the Overwatch pulse rifle across her legs. Getting its weight off her shoulder felt good. 

Freeman paced. 

“Stop it,” she said, her voice low. “Anything on the floors below us can hear you.” 

He stopped, and eventually, he sat; it was a process for him to get down to floor level, she observed. Joint by joint, sparing the hurts, keeping weight on the wall. He had a knee that didn’t want to hold him up on its own. In battle he moved like whitewater, a chaotic, unstoppable forward motion, but once standing still, adrenaline gone, apparently he felt things again. 

“Get some sleep,” she told him. “I’ll switch with you in a couple hours.” A very small lie. 

Another long five minutes of him sitting on the mattress, staring at the far wall with an unblinking focus. And then a long, thin sigh and he stretched out, boots towards the door, presenting as small a target as possible. He was on his side, the mattress allowing the angular armor to rest somewhat more easily, head pillowed on what had to be a very uncomfortable HEV forearm plate. His back to her. 

Well, he at least trusted her with his blind spot. That was progress, of a kind. 

Cat-like, curled up, facing away; so many people misread that as distain and missed the demonstration of trust. She smiled, remembering her initial assessment of the sleep-deprived researcher, wondered what it would take to bridge the gulf now. Then, the stars above and future before them, life had seemed so simple. Working her hand up his back, easing the tension in his neck as he tried to keep signing despite the distraction, her elation when words failed him and he leaned into her touch. Watching the white darts of meteors burn through atmosphere, joking about aliens and space travel and secret conspiracies. She felt like she’d finally met the real Gordon Freeman, the casual, talkative, intelligent man whose face lit up when he explained some high physics concept she’d completely missed. She hadn’t cared what absurdly long words he’d been trying to spell one-handed on her palm, she’d cared that his hands were dry and firm, not damp and trembling; that his eyes were bright with interest, not wide with exhaustion. 

The night before the end of the world. The years hadn’t taken that memory from her. 

But now between them was twenty years of warfare, for her, and the bloodbath of Black Mesa and horror of temporal displacement, for him. In his time they were scarcely a week from that night. In hers, time had moved too far. 

He wasn’t asleep. 

His body was tense, held unnaturally still. His hand on his automatic, the crowbar angled for a quick grab. He trusted her with his blind spot, but not his life. 

“Hey, anything comes up those stairs, the glass’ll wake you before I can see it to shoot it,” she said. “How long has it been since you slept?” 

He waved his hand, a tired _I don’t know._

“Exactly. Sleep now, I need you functional tomorrow. We all do. We can’t win this war without you.” Probably not the right words for a guy she was trying to put to bed. 

He made a one-handed sign for _useless._ She didn’t know if he meant the idea of sleeping, the war, or himself. Or her. He was still rigidly tense.

She took a breath and made a decision. Gulfs don’t bridge themselves, and ‘useless’ was the wrong word for any of it. She scooted over to his mattress and settled against the wall again, with her hip and leg pressed to his armored back. She tapped the HEV. “I ain’t going anywhere. I got you back alive and I swear I’ll keep you that way. Now either you believe me or you don’t, but listen to me.” She kept her voice low, just above a whisper. “I’ve worked hard to survive this life. I’ve done a lot of things I am not proud of, in this uniform and out of it. I’ve hurt people and I’ve lost people and I’ve had to kill good friends’ bodies after crabs ate their brains out. But I’m alive and so are Kleiner and Eli and Alyx, and a whole lot of other folks, because of what you did at Black Mesa.” 

That got her a response. He shifted up, stared at her narrow-eyed over his shoulder. 

She glared right back and gripped his shoulder, wondering if the touch translated through the armor plating. “Yeah. I’m pretty glad I’m alive, Freeman. Alyx is too. I saw the tapes. I know what went on.” 

Now he was struggling to sit up and face her but she leaned down on his arm, keeping him pinned on the mattress shockingly easily. His weakness surprised and scared her. “No, you sit still and listen to me.” Rolling a hissy cat in a towel until it quits being a brat and takes its medicine, she thought, and banished the mental image. “I got out a few minutes after you died, Freeman. I watched the soldiers drag you out and dump your body. I figured, well, at least he went quick and with his head still on. Small blessings, right?” She remembered her throat raw from screaming, hands burning on the overheated automatic as she emptied the clip impotently into the portal’s wall. “And then after we got out, I got folks together, and got them safe, and then I went back. And I pulled the security archive for the entire facility and dumped it on the satellite so I could prove you’d been murdered, and I picked up Eli and Alyx and Kleiner and a pile of others, and we ran for the old mines. They nuked the place, not long after, and about that time the portal storms started and the Combine showed up and suddenly no one cared about Black Mesa anymore.” 

He’d quit squirming and now was back to staring at the wall, but less distantly. 

“Now we had a little time until we could move safely so a few of us sat down and went through all that footage. So yeah, Freeman, I know you’ve had a hell of a week. And I saw that fellow with the briefcase stalking you like a mantis all over, walking through walls and popping up in places he wasn’t supposed to be, and when you went through to Xen and never came back, well, figured maybe you weren’t alone over there. Hoped, at least, because when I was there, I didn’t see much in the way of conversation partners. Now I don’t know what his game is or exactly what went on for you between then and now, except apparently it wasn’t much, while the rest of us took the long way to today, but I don’t intend to lose what we’ve gained because you fell asleep half way up the Citadel. I’m right here.” She tapped the HEV back plate again with her gloved knuckles. “I ain’t moving until dawn.” 

He was quiet but not as tense. The mattress shifted as he realigned himself, the armor now moving with his breath. He spelled out “Xen.” 

“Yeah, I was there too.” She patted the arm plate and took her weight off it. “Nice sky, gravity a little funny, wildlife kinda cute once you get past the people-eating and all. Don’t really blame them for taking offense to folks stealing their crystals but I don’t think it quite warranted all this nonsense.” 

He sniffed like his nose was running, and she kept her eyes on the door and her elbow resting on his shoulder; he’d probably had enough of her in his business and might not know yet that grown men falling to little pieces was a fairly regular occurrence and no cause for shame. 

She felt him fall asleep, felt the mattress sink a little, the shift of the armor with his breath become a deep, even pattern. She’d slept cheek by jowl with her fellow soldiers more nights than she’d spent alone, crammed in hideaways or trunks of cars or cargo containers, huddled under blankets together as dirty snow fell in the forest or sharing coats around a tiny campfire and praying the headcrabs didn’t swarm that night. Had she ever been as keenly aware of them, of every breath and small noise and heartbeat, as she was of him? She couldn’t remember. 

  


_”Thanks, and sorry,”_ he signed from his side of the doorway alcove. 

They’d gotten down the staircase as a tag-team, pulse rifles up, and emerged to a clear, bright and windless morning, the street free of enemies and, a rarity, no incessant mechanical chirp of scanners or distant rattling gunfire. 

He’d slept about five hours, she estimated, and had been quiet as they split water and tough ration bars of indeterminate age. She was used to the stuff, a twice-baked leathery mix of beans, peanut butter, fiber powder, dried fruit and dehydrated headcrab meat, but the look on his face when he’d tried to choke it down had said a lot about how it compared to pre-Combine food. 

She couldn’t remember what that tasted like. 

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Might be the last sleep you get for a while.” She checked her side of the street: all clear. 

_”I didn’t know anyone else had been to Xen and survived.”_

“Yeah. I don’t think anyone else has.” It wasn’t something she told people about. Kleiner knew, and Vance senior, but she didn’t know if Magnussen knew. Not that he would have cared. Mossman did not know because there’d never been a reason to tell her. And by the time Alyx was old enough to understand what had happened at Black Mesa, Calhoun hadn’t felt much like talking about it. 

Her eyes met Freeman’s over the CP rifle. Had he sensed the same dueling wonder and horror she had, standing on the border world, seeing a different universe? Was it permitted, or was it a betrayal of humanity, to have loved that glimpse of an alien sky? 

  



End file.
